We need to talk about one of the most difficult things, God. Christian thought needs a radical new theology, 70 years after the holocaust.
One thing i have found quite shocking is the out moded idea that suffering and illness happen because they sinned and had it brought upon them. We call this victim -blaming.
In Jewish thought, Emmanual Levinas is a useful philosopher who is shaped by the Nazi horror He lived 1906-1995
He said that the justification of suffering is at the heart of all immortality.
Dr Tamra Wright also brought a feminist response to the holocaust, Melissa Raphael - The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Feminist Theology of the Holocaust.
Someone quoted Whitney Houston "what's God got to do with it?" and doesn't see (the late Reform Judaism Chief Rabbi Hugo Gryn) "where was God?" are we asking the wrong question?
Could any of you envisage having this conversation in Poland? The conversations that follow are very depressing. In arts, should we remain silent about it or speak about it?
See also,
Zoe Waxman Writing the Holocaust
Olivia who works for Holocaust Memorial Day Trust says a significant proportion of events are based on rituals such as prayer. We have seen genocides since them which add in to the discussion.

I have been reading "The Greater Londoner", which has appeared just in time for the London elections following a poll which shows that the Tories (I don't call them Conservatives because they have been radically attacking our society) might win. However it's interesting what the Tories haven't mentioned

The word Tory or Conservative, though they point cheap jibes at "backwards" Labour several times they somehow pitch themselves as above politics. The only time the word Conservative appears is in the small-print. The printing is done by a "Plc" and almost certainly the production was funded by tax-dodgers. The Green Party pay their tax and don't hold investments in bad businesses. Zac and Boris are notorious slackers and Zac is so "independent" he never drew a salary in his life.

Climate change: No doubt they are of the opinion that this issue is not their strong point. Any serious climate change action would mean tackling vested interests and seriously reforming or replacing capitalism (an other word they don't dare print). They talk about trees, greener, future, cleaner, electric cars (ffs) and protecting green spaces that "we love" - yet all these principles go out the window if you look at their flagship project in West Hendon estate: None of the promised parking for electric cars, no consent from the local community, not even consultation when York Park was built-on, including our lovely trees felled one by one. They would not get away with these violations of the peace in a well-to-do area.

Air pollution: an other thing the Tory mayor and assembly are in total denial on! VW was just the tip of the iceberg of their deception. Even if Matthew Offord gave a pig about air pollution they would not listen to him because the environment is their third priority after transport which means it does not come before transport.

London's car crisis: Roads, freight, traffic congestion! Congestion charge anyone?? The new river crossing you would think from what they write, will be a garden bridge with new homes on it as well. They talk about cycle safety in quite a victim-blaming way.

The Green Belt

The word "affordable" in relation to housing.

The fact that this is also a London Assembly election. Whilst the Mayor is important to the main two parties, and has most of the power in the GLA, the Assembly "holds the mayor to account" and is elected by a more proportional system. You can vote green as your first preference on the orange ballot paper and elect greens. It will make a really big difference because only about half of people event turn out

so your registering to vote can make a the difference between 2 and 3 Green Party politicians elected to represent all of London. Even if Greens don't have any seats on your local council, a Green vote makes a big difference! This doesn't stop the Tories sneering at the Green Party in private though, claiming we're on benefits and so on.

The leaflet does mention arts and culture. Simon Jenkins wrote a piece recently saying that London doesn't need Simon Rattles concert Hall, or a £20bn HS2 Crossrail line going north-to-south. The fact is that under a Tory Mayor and a Tory Council, the Church Farmhouse museum in Hendon Church End is still a blight when before it was a museum which I enjoyed! This won't be one of the 81 museums that now have wi-fi. It's a disgrace and the only way to hold Boris and his mates to account for the loss of this place of cultural heritage, is to vote Green on the orange ballot for the common good and use your other votes to get the Tories out. The Tories are responsible for the loss of Libraries and it's Tory councils who've been degrading our primary, secondary and further education, with the London Tories' political support.
I talk a lot of anti-capitalist rhetoric about how aweful Plc's are, such as armaments companies, and eco-stream, and fossil fuels, but my belief is that the people have the power. It's our choice in our workplace, in our lifestyles, and at the ballot box, when we fall for neo-liberal politicians, to hand that power over to corporations. That is why they make such good campaigning targets the rest of the year round. Ultimately the reason I've always been a Green Activist is because petitioning companies, leaders and politicians to green demands can only get us so far.

Yesterday this appeared on my blogger friend Adam's facebook wall or whatever they call that nowadays, with some photos. I met them a few hours after the 350.org red lines protest at the Eiffel Tower and the atmosphere was amazing. The French organisation Alternatiba were involved with a "human chain" which has become symbolic. We lit candles forming a human chain with Oil Vay! and the Paris community. My photos from last week are now on my flickr page.

Yesterday around 15,000 people gathered on the streets of Paris to call – to scream – for climate justice. Ordinarily this would be unremarkable, but it is just a few weeks after the deadly attacks and a state of emergency remains in place prohibiting gatherings of 10 or more people. Many who had planned to come to Paris were quite reasonably frightened off. That anything happened on the streets at all in this highly tense and uneasy atmosphere, on streets thronged with armed police,at all is a small miracle.

We can celebrate successfully taking a space and having a chance to scream. What we can't celebrate is having our words twisted.

Those who did make it on Saturday has a very clear message to shout: our leaders have failed, so we're going to defend our climate instead.

The woefully inadequate final text was just being circulated amongst the delegates as people to the streets to draw 'red lines' – our line in the sand that we would not allow the climate to fry despite the failings of the UN process. We stretched from the Arc de Triumph, symbol of the French Military, towards la Defense, France's financial epicentre: war and corporate power seek to cross these red lines. On the lines of cloth we laid flowers representing the victims of climate change: the World Health Organisation estimates climate changes kills 200,000 people a year.

The BBC and others reported we took to the streets on Saturday to 'celebrate' a deal well struck at the UN. This is a lie. Even if it is less appallingly inadequate than it might have been, the deal struck this weekend gives a free break for fossil fuel companies to pollute, lets the richest continue to churn out CO2 at the expense of the poor, and does nowhere near enough to keep our climate a, still unhealthy, 1.5oC above pre-industrial levels.

We have drawn our red lines. The UN deal threatens to cross them. If we were celebrating anything on Saturday, it was the start of this fight. Everyone of the 15,000 in Paris were representing thousands more of you, the movement, fighting on around the world – like the Queen's University Belfast students occupying for fossil fuel divestment this weekend.

A whole climate justice movement, built on the solidarity of new global alliances between indigenous groups, workers and peace activists and armed with a fearless radicalism, is renewed and dispersed from Paris today to the four corners of the earth.

My blog from Paris climate talks.
Text alerts from Friends of the Earth have been very useful, though as a "shomer Shabbat" individual I have only just read them.
Today's geolocalosation action developed brand new technology to beat the state of emergency in Paris, with 3000 people taking part in saying climate justice peace.
A treaty debrief will happen tomorrow but just when i was asking where our delegates were, Maria Kola appeared and said hi, though tonight she mostly spoke Greek i got a selfie with this engineering dreamer, that universal language of the twitter generation.
It is matt genn's birthday so i put on a Beatles record for him, much to the annoyance of green partiers whose track i interrupted.
I met a young green from Bulgaria, and people from other places, and updated French colleagues on how we are doing in England.
I feel like this week has really strengthened air transport campaigns both French and English despite the classic failure of the UN FCcc on this.
I spoke to my lovely German colleague about the possibility of smashing ttip the weekend of February 13th

(I visited one of the signatories below, on my recent trip to Israel for my cousin's wedding [They already have a baby!]) - Ben

To the Jewish People, to all Communities of Spirit,

and to the World:

A Rabbinic Letter on the Climate Crisis

We come as Jews and rabbis with great respect for what scientists teach us – for as we understand their teaching, it is about the unfolding mystery of God’s Presence in the unfolding universe, and especially in the history and future of our planet. Although we accept scientific accounts of earth’s history, we continue to see it as God’s creation, and we celebrate the presence of the divine hand in every earthly creature.

Yet in our generation, this wonder and this beauty have been desecrated -- not in one land alone but ‘round all the Earth. So in this crisis, even as we join all Earth in celebrating the Breath of Life that interweaves us all -- –

-- You sea-monsters and all deeps, Hallelu-Yah.

Fire, hail, snow, and steam, Hallelu-Yah.

Stormy wind to do God's word, Hallelu-Yah.

Mountains high and tiny hills, Hallelu-Yah (Psalm 148)

We know all Earth needs not only the joyful human voice but also the healing human hand.

We are especially moved when the deepest, most ancient insights of Torah about healing the relationships of Earth and human earthlings, adamah and adam, are echoed in the findings of modern science.

The texts of Torah that perhaps most directly address our present crisis ar Leviticus 25-26 and Deuteronomy 15. They call for one year of every seven to be Shabbat Shabbaton – a Sabbatical Year – and Shmittah – a Year of restful Release for the Earth and its workers from being made to work, and of Release for debtors from their debts.

In Leviticus 26, the Torah warns us that if we refuse to let the Earth rest, it will “rest” anyway, despite us and upon us – through drought and famine and exile that turn an entire people into refugees.

This ancient warning heard by one indigenous people in one slender land has now become a crisis of our planet as a whole and of the entire human species. Human behavior that overworks the Earth – especially the overburning of fossil fuels --- crests in a systemic planetary response that endangers human communities and many other life-forms as well.

sea-level rises, and the expansion of disease-bearing insects from “tropical” zones into what used to be “temperate” regions. Leviticus 26 embodied. Scientific projections of the future make clear that even worse will happen if we continue with carbon-burning business as usual.

As Jews, we ask the question whether the sources of traditional Jewish wisdom can offer guidance to our political efforts to prevent disaster and heal our relationship with the Earth. Our first and most basic wisdom is expressed in the Sh’ma and is underlined in the teaching that through Shekhinah the Divine presence dwells within as well as beyond the world. The Unity of all means not only that all life is interwoven, but also that an aspect of God’s Self partakes in the interwovenness.

We acknowledge that for centuries, the attention of our people – driven into exile not only from our original land but made refugees from most lands thereafter so that they were bereft of physical or political connection and without any specific land – has turned away from this sense of interconnection of adam and adamah, toward the repair of social injustice. Because of this history, we were so much pre-occupied with our own survival that we could not turn attention to the deeper crisis of which our tradition had always been aware.

But justice and earthiness cannot be disentangled. This is taught by our ancient texts – teaching that every seventh year be a Year of Release, Shmittah, Shabbat Shabbaton, in which there would be not only one year’s release of Earth from overwork, but also one year’s sharing by all in society of the Earth’s freely growing abundance, and one year’s release of debtors from their debts.

Indeed, we are especially aware that this very year is, according to the ancient count, the Shmita Year.

The unity of justice and Earth-healing is also taught by our experience today: The worsening inequality of wealth, income, and political power has two direct impacts on the climate crisis. On the one hand, great Carbon Corporations not only make their enormous profits from wounding the Earth, but then use these profits to purchase elections and to fund fake science to prevent the public from acting to heal the wounds. On the other hand, the poor in America and around the globe are the first and the worst to suffer from the typhoons, floods, droughts, and diseases brought on by climate chaos.

So we call for a new sense of eco-social justice – a tikkun olam that includes tikkun tevel, the healing of our planet. We urge those who have been focusing on social justice to address the climate crisis, and those who have been focusing on the climate crisis to address social justice.

Though as rabbis we are drawing on the specific practices by which our Torah makes eco-social justice possible, we recognize that in all cultures and all spiritual traditions there are teachings about the need for setting time and space aside for celebration, restfulness, reflection.

Yet in modern history, we realize that for about 200 years, the most powerful institutions and cultures of the human species have refused to let the Earth or human earthlings have time or space for rest. By overburning carbon dioxide and methane into our planet's air, we have disturbed the sacred balance in which we breathe in what the trees breathe out, and the trees breathe in what we breathe out. The upshot: global scorching, climate crisis.

The crisis is worsened by the spread of extreme extraction of fossil fuels that not only heats the planet as a whole but damages the regions directly affected.

§ Fracking shale rock for oil and “unnatural gas” poisons regional water supplies and induces the shipment of volatile explosive “bomb trains” around the country.

§ Coal burning not only imposes asthma on coal-plant neighborhoods – often the poorest and Blackest – but destroys the lovely mountains of West Virginia.

§ Extracting and pipe-lining Tar Sands threatens Native First nation communities in Canada and the USA, and endangers farmers and cowboys through whose lands the KXL Pipeline is intended to traverse..

§ Drilling for oil deep into the Gulf and the Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound off the Pacific have already brought death to workers and to sea life and financial disasters upon nearby communities. Proposed oil drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic threaten worse.

All of this is overworking Earth -- precisely what our Torah teaches we must not do. So now we must let our planet rest from overwork. For Biblical Israel, this was a central question in our relationship to the Holy One. And for us and for our children and their children, this is once again the central question of our lives and of our God. HOW? -- is the question we must answer.

So here we turn from inherited wisdom to action in our present and our future. One way of addressing our own responsibility would be for households, congregations, denominations, federations, political action --- to Move Our Money from spending that helps these modern pharaohs burn our planet to spending that helps to heal it. For example, these actions might be both practical and effective:

§ Purchasing wind-born rather than coal-fired electricity to light our homes and synagogues and community centers;

§ Organizing our great Federations to offer grants and loans to every Jewish organization in their regions to solarize their buildings;

§ Shifting our bank accounts from banks that invest in deadly carbon-burning to community banks and credit unions that invest in local neighborhoods, especially those of poor, Black, and Hispanic communities;

§ Insisting that our tax money go no longer to subsidizing enormously profitable Big Oil but instead to subsidizing the swift deployment of renewable energy -- as quickly in this emergency as our government moved in the emergency of the early 1940s to shift from manufacturing cars to making tanks.

§ Convincing our legislators to institute a system of carbon fees and public dividends that rewards our society for moving beyond the Carbon economy.

These examples are simply that, and in the days and years to come, we may think of other approaches to accomplish these ecological ends.

America is one of the most intense contributors to the climate crisis, and must therefore take special responsibility to act. Though we in America are already vulnerable to climate chaos, other countries are even more so –-- and Jewish caring must take that truth seriously. Israeli scientists, for example, report that if the world keeps doing carbon business as usual, the Negev desert will come to swallow up half the state of Israel, and sea-level rises will put much of Tel Aviv under water.

Israel itself is too small to calm the wide world’s worsening heat. Israel’s innovative ingenuity for solar and wind power could help much of the world, but it will take American and other funding to help poor nations use the new-tech renewable energy created by Israeli and American innovators.

We believe that there is both danger and hope in American society today, a danger and a hope that the American Jewish community, in concert with our sisters and brothers in other communities of Spirit, must address. The danger is that America is the largest contributor to the scorching of our planet. The hope is that over and over in our history, when our country faced the need for profound change, it has been our communities of moral commitment, religious covenant, and spiritual search that have arisen to meet the need. So it was fifty years ago during the Civil Rights movement, and so it must be today.

As we live through this Shmittah Year, we are especially aware that Torah calls for Hak’heyl -- assembling the whole community of the People Israel during the Sukkot after the Shmittah year, to hear and recommit ourselves to the Torah’s central teachings.

So we encourage Jews in all our communities to gather on the Sunday of Sukkot this year, October 4, 2015, to explore together our responsibilities toward the Earth and all humankind, in this generation.

Our ancient earthy wisdom taught that social justice, sustainable abundance, a healthy Earth, and spiritual fulfillment are inseparable. Today we must hear that teaching in a world-wide context, drawing upon our unaccustomed ability to help shape public policy in a great nation. We call upon the Jewish people to meet God’s challenge once again.